Adventure classics -- A book, a beauty and the devil

The Club Dumas

by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Arturo Perez-Reverte

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A mysterious death leaves a beautiful widow. A wealthy businessman seeks arcane help to increase his power. And a shady hunter of lost books finds himself in league with, well, maybe the devil.

Not since Raymond Chandler has a detective story been as darkly intellectual as Spanish journalist Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas. And before Dan Brown, Perez-Reverte was hatching plots about secret societies and the awakening of supernatural forces that led me to slot this into “fantasy month” on this blog.

I’ve broken my own rule in dubbing a book less than twenty years old an adventure classic. (The Club Dumas was published in 1993, and translated into English in 1996.) But I’m tired of hearing people ask, “who’s that?” when I name Perez-Reverte as my favorite writer. Actually, I sometimes find this a convenient way to cut off people who ask me what kind of audience I’m aiming for with my own yet-to-be published adventure novel.

But ignorance of this Spanish writer among English speakers must surely lessen since the translations not only of his modern-day thrillers but of the historical adventures of his seventeenth-century hero, Captain Alatriste, played by Viggo Mortensen in the award-winning Spanish movie released in 2006.

Spanish speakers have already made the TV version of another of Perez-Reverte’s books, The Queen of the South, the most-watched novela premiere in Telemundo’s history.

The screen, unfortunately, was less kind to the film version of The Club Dumas. Released in 1999, Roman Polanski’s version was titled The Ninth Gate. Not even Johnny Depp as the lead could save it.

Enjoy the book, instead. The language is as lush as Chandler at his best -- “She was the type of woman who takes an age to light a cigarette and looks straight into a man’s eyes as she does so” -- is Perez-Reverte’s partial description of an easily consolable widow. And the literary quotations make an entertaining treasure hunt on their own as characters discuss Dumas, Conan Doyle, and Sabatini with equal flare.

Too bad Polanski’s film cut not only the subplot about the search for a missing Dumas manuscript but the literary references. Maybe the devil made him do it.

Want to know more about Perez-Reverte? See www.perez-reverte.com/ or exercise your Spanish at the sister site, www.perezreverte.com/

(Next Friday -- Adventure classics finishes a November of fantasy with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. You’ll never read “It was a dark and stormy night” the same way again.)

Adventure classics -- Questing for unicorns

The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

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How should I read Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn? The dreamlike imagery of the book’s language almost begs to be read while under the influence of something. But the 1960’s era quest of the last unicorn on Earth to find the surviving members of her race resonates with echoes both of the Cold War and ecological disaster.

In case that sounds too somber, Beagle lightens the mix with comic skits that might have come from the likes of Monty Python. And although he states the idea for Unicorn came during an artistic retreat in 1962, when only in his early 20’s, the finished book resonates with a lifetime’s love for fantasy.

As the book says when bumbling magician Schemdrick outwits an equally bumbling outlaw, “. . . he had a good grounding in Anglo-Saxon folklore and knew the type.”

The same thing, apparently, could be said for Beagle. The book’s stream of references to mythology keep like-minded readers laughing. Or weeping, as in the scenes of the pathetic zoo of fantastic creatures in which the witch Mommy Fortuna imprisons the unicorn.

When my daughter was a child, we watched the 1982 movie of The Last Unicorn. I’m still moved by Mia Farrow’s voicing of the doomed love story of the unicorn, transformed by Schemdrick into a woman, with the son of her enemy.

Beagle, who also wrote the screenplay, has been in a long dispute with the company controlling the film. Fortunately for fans, at the New York Comic Con last month, he announced an agreement that will include a renovation of the film in time for its 30^th anniversary. Lest we forget, see the opening at YouTube The Last Unicorn, or through the link on Beagle’s Facebook page.

Also last month, at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, Beagle received a lifetime achievement award. And in Texas, fans this weekend (November 12-13) can meet him at Wizard World in the Austin Convention Center. Beagle says on his Facebook page that he’ll be at table 2505 in Artists Alley. For additional information, see www.wizardworldcomiccon.com/

(Next Friday -- Spanish ex-war correspondent Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas gets my vote for the newest adventure classic on this blog.)